Internet Privacy 101 - Your Safety Guide to Social Networking

Social networking makes it easy to connect with friends online--but not everybody online is your friend.

Using our bright and shiny Apple gear to navigate the web, it’s easy to think the Internet is all LOL Cats and sunshine, and that everyone who interacts with our social-networking profiles and other online presences really is our friend. Sadly, that’s not always the case. Depending on what you share online, where you share it, and how you control it, people who may not have your best interests at heart can find out an awful lot about your life--and potentially use that information against you.

While we obviously don’t want anybody to stalk anybody, training yourself to think like a creep, investigating how you appear on search engines, and scrutinizing your social-networking security for weaknesses can really help you reevaluate how much information you want to make available. But while there are many potential scenarios in which your data might fall into the wrong hands, there’s plenty you can do to minimize exposure to online bad guys without missing out on the best of what the web and social networking have to offer.

Keep Facebook Out of Your Face

Make friends with your privacy settings

Scenario:

Your creepy ex is friends with some people you went to high school with. You don’t want to block or de-friend your actual pals, but you don’t want your ex to see your profile, either. How can you make sure that only people you trust have access to your information on Facebook?

Answer:

Facebook’s privacy controls are pretty extensive, but like so many of the site’s settings, they’re hidden among pages of menus and text. Unfortunately, that means sometimes people don’t pay much attention to them, or aren’t vigilant about rechecking and reconfiguring them when the Facebook site is redesigned or the default privacy schemes are changed. And Facebook is famous for changing them.

The most important step you can take to minimize what the unfriendly exes of the world can see is to vastly pare down the amount and kind of info you add to Facebook. Think about what you absolutely need to share to have a presence online--is your home address really necessary?--and don’t offer more than you’d be willing to tell a stranger (or a potential employer, for that matter). Above all, ask yourself if the potential exposure of your personal information is worth what you’re getting out of belonging to Facebook, or any social network. If the answer is no, there’s no harm in dropping out of the site (don’t worry, you’ll still be a participant in the 21st century). But if the answer is yes, be sure to review the tips here before sharing your next status update.

Privacy, Please

To edit Facebook’s privacy settings, log in and choose Privacy Settings from the Account button in the top-right corner. Note the chart in the middle of the resulting Choose Your Privacy Settings page. It shows you at a glance your current privacy settings for your status, relationships, contact information, and other important details. You can edit them by choosing among Facebook’s global privacy settings, or you can fine-tune how these details--including photo albums--appear to the world individually by clicking Customize. You can even hide some details, like your religious and political views, from specific people or groups while sharing them with others.

A-List

Stick new friends in the appropriate groups as you add them, and they'll never know what they're missing on your profile.

If you have many friends whose scrutiny you want to manage, Friend Lists can simplify the job. With friends organized in groups like Close Friends, Family, and Colleagues, it’s much easier to use the Limited Profile feature to control who can see what on your profile across a wide group of people. Log in and click the Friends link in the sidebar of your Facebook Home page, then click the Create a List button at the top of your Friends page to get started. Once you’ve created a list or two, you can hide profile details from everyone in that group by entering the list’s name in Privacy Settings.

Outside the Ropes

To block an ex or other iffy online characters, edit your Block Lists at the bottom of the Privacy Settings page; from there you can block other Facebook users by their names or email addresses. (You can also select Block This User from the bottom-left corner of any Facebook profile page.) Once blocked, a person can no longer interact with you on Facebook, except within games and applications you both use. All other Facebook social ties between blocker and blockee are broken, and both will be invisible to each other on the site. Of course, blocking people won’t prevent them from scoping you out under a new name or address, so be vigilant about whom you befriend in the future.

Searchproof

Be your own publicist, and control access to you.

To control what strangers--or people claiming to be strangers--can see when searching for you on Facebook or the web, return to the Privacy Settings page and edit your Basic Directory information. Want to ensure that only friends can find you, send you messages, or view your friends? It’s all here, and some directory information can be hidden from specific friends or Friend Lists. But there’s no way to be completely invisible on Facebook. Your name, profile picture, gender, and networks are always available to everyone, to help people legitimately interested in you to get in touch. If you’re uncomfortable making your likeness public, leave your profile picture blank or use a picture representative of a hobby instead of your face.

Quit

You can always delete your account if you decide Facebook’s privacy isn’t private enough, but it’s a much trickier process than we’d like. First, log in and follow the instructions here, then leave your Facebook account untouched for 14 days. Account activity during those two weeks (including logging into your account or using a Facebook plug-in on another website) could prompt you to reactivate your account, so be careful when using Facebook-enabled sites, and consider clearing your browser’s cache and deleting cookies to help avoid accidentally re-joining Facebook as you surf.

Faceborg!

Thanks to widespread integration with other websites, it seems like the social-networking juggernaut is assimilating the entire Internet one Like button at a time. But resistance isn’t futile--here’s what three popular Facebook integration features mean for your privacy.

Facebook Connect lets you log into “connected” sites using your Facebook account, so you can juggle fewer passwords. This shares with the affiliated sites your name, profile picture, and any other information about you made publicly available in your account’s Privacy Settings. Still, because your privacy settings follow you to connected sites, blocked users won’t be able to see you on them, and Facebook information you’ve made private won’t be visible to the affiliated site or its visitors.Like buttons, activity feeds, and similar interactive features are what Facebook calls “social plug-ins,” Facebook islands that float inside their host sites to let you share opinions about the site’s content, or the content itself, with friends. But because the plug-in is technically a part of Facebook, the hosting site receives no information about you or anything you Like, Recommend, or comment on while visiting it. Your activity is shared only on your Facebook profile, or to friends within the plug-in itself, depending on how you’re set to share things you like in Facebook’s Privacy Settings. Facebook does track some data about you when you visit a plug-in–enabled site, to determine who you are in relation to your friends. To avoid this, simply log out of Facebook before visiting the site.

Instant personalization is a service that offers content customized by your Facebook account--if you’re a frequent visitor to Yelp, Microsoft Docs, or Pandora, you may have already used it. Like Facebook Connect, Instant Personalization shares with partner sites the information you’ve already made public. For example, Pandora can automatically show you nearby concerts and stations recently played by your friends. To keep your love of Burt Bacharach tunes a secret, you can opt out of Instant Personalization in the Applications and Websites section of Facebook’s Privacy Settings.

Li'l Kid Stuff -- Thanks for trying to make the internet more safe, however more parental oversight and internet safety education in the public (and private) schools would help to increase user vigilance and security...